Friday Ephemera

The Lord’s Prayer.
They apparently passed their weed-out courses but do they play golf? ? ?

His, quite frankly, is bigger than yours.
*Screams*

Lively scenes. || Lively scenes 2.
In 30 years of shopping I’ve never ended up in a brawl. What the hell is wrong with these people?

“Lester Boyd, Inventor of the fuck hat.”
Ah, if only there was a Blue Plaque scheme in Idaho…

In 30 years of shopping I’ve never ended up in a brawl.
Yes, I too have managed to waft around John Lewis and the M&S Food Hall – and do it many, many times – without once assaulting other customers with a fire extinguisher and brandishing uprooted fittings, and while screaming the word BITCH sixty-seven times.

It’s satire, but barely.
Somewhat related… Apparently, your front-door security camera “cancels out your Black Lives Matter sign.” You see, attempting to deter thievery and keep your home secure is an “anti-Black measure.”
Wokeness. Not even once.

What are “stretched tights”…?
It does rather suggest that they’ve already been worn, possibly by someone with enormous legs. Which, I gather, is not a thing ladies generally look for when buying a pair of tights.

I suspect we may need some female input on this matter.

Just a follow-up on “A Sudden, Quite Rapid, Relocation of Stock” from two weeks ago
For those who missed it.

A preference for flat stomachs is apparently caused by “colonialism and anti-blackness.”
Has she never seen the work of Rubens and other Baroque painters?

What are “stretched tights”…?
Is it possible that what’s meant is “stretch tights” – i.e. elasticated ones, and it is simply a case of an auto-generated caption giving off a false answer because of the announcer’s accent?

Thank goodness for your obvious expertise in the realm of ladies’ hosiery
It’s more expertise in deciphering YouTube subtitles, where the same problem can frequently be found.

It’s more expertise in deciphering YouTube subtitles,
That just leaves the small matter of that carrier bag full of ladies’ undergarments.

Apparently, your front-door security camera “cancels out your Black Lives Matter sign.”
IOW, “All criminals are black” – weird flex, as the kids say.
We’re seriously considering moving out of the city of Philadelphia…
Oh sure, create a convenience store junk food desert, you racist bastiges.
Meanwhile in Maryland*, a 582% increase in “gender nonconforming” students in two years. The alleged increase is utterly inexplicable.
*(pronounced Mare – uh – lund, not Mary Land as UK presenters are wont)

More brats.
https://twitter.com/damiengayle/status/1580864210741133312

More brats.
“…the cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis, fuel is more unaffordable…” – largely because of idiots like yourselves, but OK.
The only good thing is if you embiggenify the video it appears there is a glass in the frame, though it would be better if were plex, being oil based and all.
…might be apt.
Just leave them there in those incredibly awkward positions (extra glue as required – to support the cause, you know) with no food, water, sanitary amenities. Call it a performance art installation and charge people to see it.

Just leave them there in those incredibly awkward positions (extra glue as required – to support the cause, you know)
They’ve chosen to show their disdain for the norms of civilised behaviour, including social trust, which, among many other things, makes galleries possible. So let them experience a world without it.

Re: self-regarding brats – there’s no need to overcomplicate this. A simple horsewhipping is all that’s needed.

[T]here’s no need to overcomplicate this. A simple horsewhipping is all that’s needed.
Embrace the power of and, dear boy. A simple horsewhipping AND imprisonment would be an eminently suitable punishment.

Re: self-regarding brats – there’s no need to overcomplicate this. A simple horsewhipping is all that’s needed.
Why not both? A horsewhipping followed by six years in a cell without heat, light, cooked food, etc.
However, that leaves the question of the proper way to deal with the organizers.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

A frog that eats bananas?
Med students pledging to honor aboriginal ways of healing? More like scary clown world. Like that one that lives in sewers and eats children clown world.

“It’s not about the nail.”

“Lester Boyd, Inventor of the fuck hat.”
But Lester’s Indian name is…
Country boys and their crazy lateral thinking experiments that sometimes turn out to work (let’s make friends with those wolves).
We appear to be experiencing intersectional difficulties.
https://news.yahoo.com/protesters-shut-down-dearborn-school-131115557.html

Al-Qazwini and others said that they have the democratic right to decide what is appropriate in their schools since their faith is now in the majority.

What is this country where the religion with the majority numbers can set the public norms?
https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2022/10/10/lgbtq-faith-communities-dearborn-hamtramck-libraries-banned-books/10353638002/

In both cities, conservative Christians were the group who initially raised fears of LGBTQ people or books, influencing some in the city’s Muslim population to then take up their ideas and push for changes in their cities.

Muslim protesters unmasked as Baptists in brownface. A comforting explanation for liberals when Muslims don’t stick to the script. A reminder to Muslims to stick to the script and to know where their loyalties should lie.

“As Arabs and Muslims, we are the minority in America, just as LGBTQ+ people are”.

This from a high school junior, and it’s pretty standard high school essay stuff – “Unlike some people, we celebrate differences and embrace complexity.” Old melting pot: the heat from the majority assimilates newcomers into majority norms. New melting pot: minorities are ennobled and reinforced in their identity by their struggle to resist assimilation. In the new melting pot, profound differences between minorities are supposedly melted away by the shared experience of “minoritization” at the hands of the historical majority of the United States. It’s a pretty powerful melting pot that they believe in, or pretend to believe in.

“Unlike some people, we celebrate differences and embrace complexity.”
[ From the stock room, cold laughter. ]

Call it a performance art installation and charge people to see it.
Not much of a stretch. It is performative, recreational, a self-indulgent status game for spoiled children.

It is performative, recreational, a self-indulgent status game for spoiled children.
Unless I miss-heard it, ponytail-boy actually cries out for mommy when the gendarme removes his hand from the pavement.

Parking results in a Citizen’s Arrest.
An insightful discussion about science.
To be truly representational why isn’t Scooby a cat?

Parking results in a Citizen’s Arrest.
That has a certain tv show quality to it, iykwim.
Out: Girldick. In: Princess Wand
Also, tactical wank.
My guess there’s more tactics to that story than just the wank. In my day…ahem…guys who couldn’t get girls the way other guys did…or at least tried to…would join girls’ social clubs, like Juniorettes or Interact or Anchor Club…well more Interact/anchor club, Juniorettes was for the hotties…because the standard social rules of sex segregation were just starting to be eroded. Things are different today…

“After several fortifying beverages, he did it for science”
Corner of the High Street and Ingram Street, eh? Right on the border between Merchant City hipsterland and Strathclyde University. Someone did their market research on that one.
“This dude’s gonna get himself cancelled tout de suite.”
He’s not wrong, though. Booker T. Washington said much the same, about 150 years ago:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

“To be truly representational why isn’t Scooby a cat?”
As a Great Dane, he clearly identifies as a pony.

David – as you are still three hours ahead, can you check the US Powerball numbers for us? Plenty of time to get to the convenience store for tickets before the draw…

This dude’s gonna get himself cancelled tout de suite.
Just for the record, that was from last year. But definitely worth watching again.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/22/derrick-wilburn-speech-school-board-goes-viral/

Princess wand
Princess is a transfemme. What is a transfemme? Is it the same as a transwoman? I don’t know and neither did Minister Louis Farrakhan nearly 70 years ago:-
https://youtu.be/QB-gTmztgVk

David – as you are still three hours ahead, can you check the US Powerball numbers for us?
Never mind Powerball: Can you offer your services to the UK Ministry of Defense? And the US Department of Defense if you’re not feeling too peeved about how we spell aluminum?

Out: Girldick. In: Princess Wand
Also, tactical wank.
Some days I feel like a blushing ingénue.

And now semi retired conservative is time traveling, too!

His, quite frankly, is bigger than yours.
The SLAP, SLAP, SLAP of Fred the Homing Frog returning from a night out was one of the sounds of childhood.

I think this deserves a broader audience given the seriousness of the the current media environment …

“I will eat Jim Acosta, I will consume his flesh, I will make little Jim Acosta burgers and call them CNN Sliders.
Simple math here, dummies. The End of Days are coming, and when they come, it’s Thunderdome, baby. Two men enter, one man leaves with warm, sluggish “Jim Acosta” kind of feeling in his belly.
Now I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking: “Oh, Psycho means that when the country has turned into Road Warrior for a few months, and men have turned to animals scavenging for any kind of food, then, when Psycho’s on the edge of starvation, he will descend into savagery and eat Jim Acosta.”
Not even close, queerbaits. I mean the minute I even think I smell the End of Days are coming, I’m heading to Jim Acosta’s house with a bottle of Mangria and a spork.

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401340.php

[ Returns from future with tales of wonder. ]

Call it a performance art installation and charge people to see it.
Apparently, they want to “protect” people, especially poor people, by making it harder for them to stay warm during winter. And by making expensive messes that they don’t intend to clear up or pay for. Oh, and by preventing ambulances and fire engines from getting where they need to be. All while wearing T-shirts bearing the words DO AS I SAY BECAUSE I’M SO CLEVER.
I paraphrase a tad.
Or, “Some people can’t afford to heat a can of soup, like the one we’re using to vandalise this artwork; therefore we should make heating soup, and soup itself, more expensive.”
Again, I paraphrase, but just barely.

Emojis–I believe they were invented by the Egyptians in 4500BC…
Seriously though, how fragile do you have to be to get upset about a thumbs up? It defies belief. In complete contrast, I saw a video of 3 masai warriors with traditional spears and clothing stalking up to a group of 5 lions, who scattered, and they stole part of the zebra the lions had killed. I give them a thumbs up. The narrator noted that they had like five minutes to grab the meat and then the lions would return, but still. wow

Regarding Just Stop Oil and the Van Gogh.
The moment the one with the pink hair opens her mouth, the vowels alone betray the kind of background she’s from.
So it’s hardly surprising that her name turns out to be Phoebe Plummer and that she lives on a street in South London where the average house price is over a million pounds, where a 2-bedroom apartment is worth about £500,000 and a larger house as much as £4 million.
But the worst aspect of this for me – I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t an inside job.
Without very clear proof to the contrary, I am going to assume henceforth that one or more of the curators at the National Gallery were not only aware the action was going to take place, but were active in facilitating it.
Given how upper middle class almost all of the protestors in Just Stop Oil seem to be it seems highly likely that at least one of the gallery’s senior staff members is related to and/or moves in the same social circles as those of the protestors.
It’s quite one thing to start re-writing the information cards for each painting so as to show Gainsborough was a direct beneficiary of the slave trade or how Rembrandt was a misogynist and how both, as white men, oppressed women and minorities or whatever other nonsense happens to be in vogue right now.
But it’s really quite another to collaborate with wannabe student radicals to fling tomato soup at a highly influential work in the history of art in the West.
As soon as whichever curator or curators are found out to have been complicit, they need to fired from the post and receive a lifetime ban from any art gallery anywhere in the world.

… the work of art, protected by Perspex, was never in any danger, …
Yes, that’s a point cheerfully noted by the National Gallery itself, who are already boasting that the work is back on display as normal.
That fact alone suggests strongly someone at the National both knew what was going to happen and helped to facilitate it.
The children have been arrested, it’s been reported, but there’s been no mention so far of them having been charged. If the National chooses to drop charges, then I will take that as confirmation that the National was directly involved.
But anyone crowing gleefully that no harm was done are making a serious error.
If someone spits in my face, it is highly improbable that I would suffer any physical harm of any kind.
Nevertheless, spitting in someone’s face is universally one of the most grossly offensive interpersonal acts someone can commit against another.
What they are doing is no better than spitting in our faces and what’s more that’s all they are doing.
Not one of them can honestly believe that what they are doing will have any bearing on government policy.
Not one of them.

They are training the normal people to passively accept such affronts.
I fear we are well past the training stage by now.
This is more like a self-congratulatory victory lap for a job well done.
These people are evil.

More brats in need of a slap.
And so, one set of preening, cognitively flatulent tossers emboldens another. It could get quite competitive as the various subsets of the activist-wanker caste vie for retweets and media attention.

More brats in need of a slap.
They should, after the first bottle is poured out, get knocked down and dragged away by their ears. If their rich mommies and daddies complain, organize protests outside their posh homes. If they sue, crank up the protests and confrontations.

I will eat Jim Acosta, I will consume his flesh, I will make little Jim Acosta burgers and call them CNN Sliders.
Our host provides us with trenchant insights, and links that are both interesting and informative. But, as David previously wrote, the real action is in the comments.
“I Must Eat Jim Acosta” is a classic. I haven’t laughed this hard since P.J. O’Rourke’s “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”
Tip Jar hit.

David, is this what you lie awake thinking about?
Just like my life in every respect. It’s uncanny.
Tip Jar hit.
Bless you, sir. May your enemies be stuck in a car, on a long journey, with a large, flatulent dog.

And a tip of the hat to WTp.
That being from Ace of Spades, does a cereal called Kaboom mean anything to you?

Bless you, sir. May your enemies be stuck in a car, on a long journey, with a large, flatulent dog.
I wonder if that was why Mitt Romney put his on the roof of his car. But in fact at one time it was not uncommon to strap a dog carrier to the running board.

So these two glued their hands behind themselves to a smooth wall, in a standing position.
Sweep the leg.