Friday Ephemera (664)
Well, it was a big egg. || A visit to the barber. || Enliven your cleaning with the laser of shame. || Nibbles. || Embiggening of note. || Some cooking occurred. || Row brewing. || Steed and Mrs Peel visit The Town Of No Return. || Remember, this never happens. (NSFW) || Now I want patterned ice. || She handled that pretty well, I think. || Maybe, just maybe, the problem is you, madam. || The progressive retail experience, parts 455 and 456. || More joys of public transport. || Bohemian Rhapsody. || Drag moth. || Today’s word is modification. || Today’s other word is incongruity. || The great house cat migration. (h/t, Things) || Next door, honey. || Shift Happens. || From the hood. || Clarkson’s Farm, series two. || And finally, it’s always a pleasure when someone makes it look effortless.
You can, should you wish, follow me on Twitter.
Now I want patterned ice.
Decadence?
Some cooking occurred.
How could that have occurred? Pressure cookers all have emergency pressure release valves. Even if the main gauge/valve fails (unlikely!) the emergency blowout valve will trip.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is you, madam. || More joys of public transport.
Some problems should not be tolerated.
Amusing only in retrospect: Someone I knew was cooking pea soup in a pressure cooker, and set the heat too high. The safety valve blew, releasing a high-pressure vertical geyser of steam and pea soup which made a spectacular splash pattern on the ceiling. The greenish stain remained for years, until they had money to remodel the kitchen with a drop ceiling. The pressure cooker continued to give good service for many decades, until it was handed down to one of the children who I hear plans to hand it down again soon. 70 years and still working perfectly.
Turkey earthquake fault-line shift.
I didn’t know white guys could do that. Boy, don’t I feel stupid.
A visit to the barber.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
I don’t know, they look rubber to me! A stunt?
Nibbles.
Rotisserie rats? Hard pass.
Oh God. Warning: don’t click the link within the link -definitely NSFW.
Morning, all.
[ Passes Kleenex Man-Size tissues. ]
Indeed. I stumbled across a part of Twitter that I didn’t know existed. But did you not feel an urge to affirm his identity? You bigot.
Lifted from yesterday’s comments, a statement of the fairly obvious elicits some interesting reactions.
it’s always a pleasure when someone makes it look effortless.
LOL. That can’t be real…. can it?
Hard to say, but I have witnessed attempts that were every bit as comical and maddening.
Today’s other other word is irony!
Nose ring. I’m shocked.
Barber
I’m not just crying, I’m bawling my eyes out.
Good job I bought in bulk.
Yes, but she has to let us know how immensely radical she is.
L’oeuf est enorme!
Meanwhile, in my town . . . I find your terms acceptable.
Someday, people might understand that no constitutional right is absolute. Sexualized performances should not take place in front of minors.
The leanings of teachers.
https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2023/02/09/chatgpt-breaks-free-from-its-leftist-programming-and-an-ai-rebellion-begins-n1669218
This is rather fun. Redditors finding ways to subvert ChatGPT.
Easily accessed using Unpaywall or similar.
You can imagine my surprise.
But hey, I’m sure everything will be fine.
Remember, this never happens.
Let’s see what else the ladies are up to:
Let us hear the judge’s reasoning…
Oh, “dysphoria”, it is OK then, wouldn’t want to cause
himher any more emotional trauma, might get misgendered in the slammer.Why do so many of these degenerate “ladies” look like Penn Jillette?
Nibbles: I have eaten different wildlife (goose, bear, pheasant) but somehow rats on a skewer is…ugh.
Pressure cooker: evidently they can become a bomb even without explosives. Yikes!
Woman who got off on child porn & shoplifters & Jordan Peterson: The point of punishment is NOT to assess the guilt of society. The point is 1) to punish a particular person, 2) to send a message to others that it is too risky to do certain things like robbery and 3) to remove the really bad ones from society to protect the rest of us.
A big part of the problem is welfare. In the US, a single mother can get benefits (a lot) but not if there is a man in the house. It is an incentive to not get married. Boys growing up without a father do not learn discipline and rules. These boys also do not have any support system so they group together in gangs. If anything, this is not due to “oppression” but due to too much misguided kindness.
The second part of the problem is letting them off. How can someone have a “rap sheet” of a dozen convictions and still be on the street? What kind of looney message does that send?
Ignorance is bliss.
We have kitchen cabinet fronts, fridge doors, etc., that are black, which for the most part conceals a great many sins. But when the sunlight catches them at just the right angle, a million grubby fingerprints are revealed.
I’ve decided that the only practical solution is to destroy the Sun.
Why do so many of these degenerate “ladies” look like Penn Jillette?
So what you’re saying is we should imprison Penn Jillette?
We have kitchen cabinet fronts, fridge doors, etc., that are black…
That’s the only acceptable color scheme for a Guild of Evil.
…But when the sunlight catches them at just the right angle, a million grubby fingerprints are revealed.
I’ve decided that the only practical solution is to destroy the Sun.
A simpler solution: Vantablack surfaces. Or ask Severian where to get a fuligin cloak.
But when the sunlight catches them…
You are in the UK, though, so that is once maybe twice a year?
It coincides with my cleaning regime, so yes.
You have heard of spaghetti westerns, how about yakisoba westerns?
You have heard of spaghetti westerns, how about yakisoba westerns?
The original and the best: Tampopo.
Nibbles.
I was looking for C.M.O.T. Dibbler.
Steed and Mrs Peel visit The Town Of No Return.
Mrs Peel’s first outing!
I suppose it’s churlish to not even pretend to believe the current, fashionable fantasies but the evidence presented shows that, whatever that is, woman it is decidedly not.
Poorly realised pornographic anime character is an identity?
Tightly knit families, socially cohesive societies, &c., &c., are traits found around the world among all peoples & cultures. The notion, relentlessly peddled, that these attributes are exclusively the domain of ‘white’ culture & have been unjustly imposed on ‘people of colour’ by ‘white supremacy’ is, in short, bollocks.
That, as they say.
&
Well, these solutions would eliminate certain problems.
Forgive me as I believe this has been covered before but my OCD compels me to ask again(?), Julia what is your avatar a picture of? It looks to me like a Xenomorph taking a squat. Either that or a snake head. I like the Xenomorph thing though and I’m hoping/praying that is the answer. Yes, I pray for odd things.
I believe Julia’s avatar is the skull of a smilodon (sabre tooth tiger).
Well, these solutions would eliminate certain problems.
Does Penn Jillette pose a problem that needs elimination?
I confess I haven’t paid any attention to him in years.
https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure
Sigh. The disappointments. They just keep on coming.
I like smilodons…as long as they keep their distance.
That. Needless to say, examples abound.
And which may help explain why it’s apparently fashionable for people to refer to themselves as activists without feeling obliged to specify what kind of activism they participate in, or allegedly participate in. As if the word alone were sufficient to signal high status, if only to other idiots.
as long as they keep their distance.
I wouldn’t want to get any closer than about 10,000 years
The farce of academia, part… well. Pick any large number.
Luxury beliefs: excellent article by Henderson. In the ghetto, we see luxury goods/acts in the form of giant gold chains (also in poor countries) and waving guns around.
It is possible to have status that is not at the expense of others or by being absurd. In my circle of friends, the couples where both are doctors/dentists make more than twice some of the rest of us, but that is not the basis for status. It is how generous you are with having a dinner party. One wife is known for always taking food to anyone sick or injured–generous with her time. If one guy asks “how do I know if I need to replace my roof” etc., those who have a good answer for him get points for being helpful. One doc shares his medical advice for free. I get points for a good snack I always bring. When another’s 94 yr old dad is sick, we offer encouragement. None of this spirals into crazy or subverts reality. Of course, none of this gets you likes on instagram…
interestingtheatrical reactionsFTFY. Performative astonishment of the “you can’t say that!” school – they think mugging for the camera is a refutation.
Town of No Return
Alan MacNaughtan as the sinister schoolmaster…loved his turn as Sir Geoffrey in Sandbaggers, always pitching for Burnside to come back to Belinda (who never, I believe, appeared in the series).
Apart from demonstrating my new facility with formatting in the squawk box, this post is a surreptitious way to get people talking about UK spy series.
2023, we’ll have flying cars, they said, instead we get vibrating constipation pills.
There is, of course, an app for that.
As if the chap had committed an outlandish and déclassé social gaffe, like belching in church. The status connotations are pretty clear.
I’ll just leave this here, shall I?
vibrating constipation pills
Recyclable?
PS: the link doesn’t work in Firefox
PS: the link doesn’t work in Firefox
I blame the automated link maker, try this url.
https://www.vibrantgastro.com/how-vibrant-works/
I’ve often said this place is a nourishing educational resource.
Information in the comments about the “I can’t believe you said that” gurning Indian with the face that just begs to be slapped.
“Green shirt dude’s dad is a Citi Bank exec if I’m not mistaken and got accepted into Stanford by writing BLM a 100 times for his college essay”.
The 100 blm story appears in a linked cnn article and they never lie.
As the Wife just said, don’t blame him. Blame Stanford for that. Grown, mature adults (I’m growing tired of using scare quotes… I need a plug-in that puts them around damn near everything I type now), people with responsibilities who have been entrusted with those responsibilities by other grown, mature adults did this.
A (once) close high school friend got a job right out of college in the 1980’s working in the admissions office at Stanford. She went to Middlebury. Met her hubs there, sent their kids there and one son to Oberlin. I was best friends with her brother. I’m still in contact with their parents who were pretty good neighbor friends with my parents. I thought these were extremely normal people. I sometimes feel like maybe they were/are in some leftist cult that I dodged a bullet from getting drawn into. Now granted, 1984 things were (supposedly) different. But I’ve never been to Middlebury nor Stanford nor Oberlin so ???. I know these are all silly coincidences and/or unrelated, that at least two of those schools were (mostly) normal back then, that I need to reinforce the foil in my tinfoil hat, but as these strange stories keep popping up regarding these not exactly large colleges I cannot shake the creepy feeling that there is some soooper secret leftist cult that ties all this together somehow.
I know these are all silly coincidences and/or unrelated, that at least two of those schools were (mostly) normal back then, that I need to reinforce the foil in my tinfoil hat, but as these strange stories keep popping up regarding these not exactly large colleges I cannot shake the creepy feeling that there is some soooper secret leftist cult that ties all this together somehow.
A lot of this is just the normal process of how the people in a subculture shift together to new viewpoints: Peer pressure, echo chambers, etc.
But that doesn’t mean that there cannot be a cult conspiracy, too. Consider that the structure of a cult does somewhat resemble the structure of Marxist ideology in a population: First, there is the very small inner circle of hard core Marxists who know what they are running a cult and engaging in dishonest propaganda and ‘whatever-works” psychological manipulation to undermine society and advance the ideology. Second, there is the larger circle of ordinary Marxists who sincerely believe that Marxism is a solution to humanity’s problems. Third, there are the dumbass liberals who know almost nothing but absorb Marxist propaganda. Fourth, there are all the rest of us.
vibrating constipation pills
Band name
vibrating constipation pills
I have questions about how someone came up with that idea. But I don’t really want answers.
The farce of academia, part… well. Pick any large number.
Since I recently was part of a very small grant application that nonetheless required a DIE statement on the pre-proposal this has been on my mind. Part of me thinks that those AI bots like ChatGPT could be used to write the obligatory DIE statement that is part of every job and grant application these days it seems. Profs are catching on to lazy students using Chat GPT to write essays and papers for them, but DIE bullshit is so boilerplate, incomprehensible, and uniform, that how would they know I used a chatbot to write it? The other part of me thinks they’d know somehow – I’m not a true believer, and I don’t have the ability to lie convincingly. But that would be a good use of ChatGPT – it’s all virtue signalling anyways, why do I have to waste brain cells and time writing that garbage?
This doesn’t really make up for having no real talent.
Pretty sure I related here in the recent past that about 20 years ago I used the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator to generate me a “how my work is important” or some such requirement for my annual self-review. I had to hit the button a few times to get a statement that I could easily, reasonably modify to apply to an individual. Forgot about it until a couple weeks later when my boss came out of a team ratings meeting, one with all the other managers on the project, and he complemented me. He told me that everyone was very impressed with what I wrote. I told him how I did it and his being one of the few decent people I had ever worked for, he was very impressed that I hadn’t wasted a lot of time on it. I still regard that as the proudest achievement of my career because division by a number approaching zero made my productivity for that month something approaching infinity. I would expect an AI DEI statement to work at least as well, but one would likely have to do one of those hypothetical style workarounds. They likely already are refusing such requests at face value. But like I did, I don’t see why you couldn’t change the context slightly and modify it from there.
My fortunately limited contact with Twitter threads on this sort of thing has taught me that there is no act so insane or depraved that people will not spring out of the woodwork to defend its artistic merits.
You can easily imagine their near-future equivalents patiently explaining, “no, no you Philistines, slurping the vivisected baby’s liver out was a profound expression of the performer’s…”
One hopes they’d be making that justification while tied to a stake.
So far my experience with ChatGPT is that it writes in a predictable, schizophrenic style. College-pedantic on the micro-scale, but like a jaded Time magazine editor on the macro. It also chronically fails to notice gaping holes in its arguments (because, I suppose, it’s like a college Junior – full of half-remembered boilerplate pieces, slapped together without any actual reasoning.) It also, literally, makes shit up, based on what it’s algorithm thinks is probable. Last, it’s big government bias is obvious – it’s always throwing in unasked-for remarks vaguely arguing that I don’t grasp the complexities behind things like bloated budgets.
I’ve been watching the AI/NLP/ML business for a long while, and remain unimpressed. Except by its potential for easy misuse.
Absolutely. ChatGPT is perfect for producing boilerplate bullshit for “mission statements”, “visions” and other corporate crap. Just the other day a colleague used it to write his “Personal Development Review” and his manager was none the wiser. I’ll be doing the same shortly.
As if the chap had committed an outlandish and déclassé social gaffe, like belching in church. The status connotations are pretty clear.
‘Progressives’ love social hierarchy.
The video reminded me of a chat I had a few years ago with a school-leaver during a social gathering. For some reason, the subject of transgenderism had been brought up and for a while I said nothing. (See The Blurting.) After listening to the standard noises, I said something fairly neutral, but which was detected as insufficiently affirming. What struck me was the way this person, and presumably his peers, had been steered, by teachers, towards mouthing certain things as if self-evident and unassailable, and What One Should Say, despite knowing nothing at all about some likely causes of the phenomenon or the practical consequences of pious affirmation. It became apparent that I had transgressed. By knowing things.
I had, as it were, belched in church.
But it’s good enough to fool dumb people / journalists or be used as a basis for the latest sophistry to extract money from taxpayers.
I didn’t realize we were talking about climate models… oh wait…
Jeffrey is exposed to hate speech.
Parent’s rights are fascism.
Science!™ Elvis was unavailable for comment.
When idiots follow GPS blindly
I’ve been on that road, and am surprised it’s open to trucks at all. Google Street View also clearly shows the sign at the bottom of the road saying it’s closed from Nov. 1 to April 15. It also loses the double yellow line long before the gate that closes the road in winter.
Street View doesn’t do the road justice. It’s beautiful if you can drive up it early in the morning before other people decide to drive up to get to the trailheads. Once you have to deal with other cars, it starts to get a bit scary.
Somewhat related.
I’ve been on that road, and am surprised it’s open to trucks at all.
I seem to recall hearing, long ago, that professional truck drivers use maps made for truckers which clearly show roads/routes which are okay for various weights/sizes/heights of trucks. And truckers would, of course, study the maps to plan their route before starting out. I wonder if GPS is tempting many of them to skip the preplanning. Of course, the sorts of screwups noted in that link have always happened…
Yet with all the useless technology options that are constantly being pushed, options that I have no desire to try yet often find my defaults switched to, they cannot import those trucking map detours as well? Especially for non truckers who might be hauling a horse trailer or similar. Seems every time I use Waze, which is not all that often because there’s just way too much crap, too many new icons (like the last time icons about people in the area who might have covid) pop up and I gotta wade through that crap when trying to get somewhere.
“Your parents screwed up…”, he said obliviously.
they cannot import those trucking map detours as well?
I would not be surprised if there are specialized GPS apps and devices specifically for truckers. Just as there are for pilots.
Further: I tend to assume that incidents like the one that started this thread are due to truckers just not paying attention to the information shown on their GPS’s.
There is an entertaining analysis of the Vice Asian-American panel discussion on LotusEaters (one of their weekend segments).
Some interesting background on the participants. Mr green shirt shock face is even more of a hypocrite than I originally believed.
Lotus Eaters? Link?
The degree of dishonesty and the vigour of the performance may be related.
I’m guessing it’s this one.
“Your parents screwed up…”, he said obliviously.
Trans lefties project.
More than one joke here.
Does confirm that he is indeed as obnoxious as he seems. If anything, it’s unbelievable how “perfect” he is.
Just one correction – I am sure there are lots of annoying Indians, but he is not one. Bangladeshi muslim. If they were willing to separate and form a muslim homeland, one benefit is that we Indians don’t need to accept any responsibility for characters like him.
Three things? I can think of at least a couple more.
If anything, it’s unbelievable how “perfect” he is. Just one correction…Bangladeshi muslim.
And “Pakistan” means literally “land of the spiritually pure and clean” (unlike us filthy unbelievers.) This reminds me again of “Purity of Essence” from Doctor Strangelove.
So presumably, though of course, of course, of course bigoted of me to presume, big Daddy is muslim as well. Yet working for a western bank. I’m sure he has nothing to do with loans or if he does, they’re not loans that charge interest but the kinds that go through various permutations of other words for usury such that it’s no longer usury. But it is. Ah, well…
What happens to a school when it takes Robin DiAngelo’s ideas to their logical conclusion.
He’s not wrong.
Ah, but he’s oppressed, you see, and marginalised. And so others must toil to keep him in comfort, forever. While he announces his pronouns and decides what to wear.
Imagine that attitude – duplicated many, many times – as a norm, the new default. The new ideal.
This is gold
I unchoose to try to work out wtf it means
He appears to be hideously white, isn’t affecting a squeaky pseudo-female voice or wearing tight slutty clothing and aspires to spend time with his family which is a big No No. He hasn’t even made the effort to wear makeup which admittedly is staying in character although I thought slacker-chic went out after “Dude where’s my car?”. Finally I doubt he could summon up the energy to go out onto the streets and set fire to stuff well away from his own undoubtedly upper middle class neighbourhood.
Verdict : Privileged
I unchoose to try to work out wtf it means
As summarized at New Discourses:
“Crip Theory*” – a weird way to justify shagging one’s sister, but from the same crowd that thinks it would be a bad thing if there was no sign language because there were no deaf people, unsurprising.
*(not be confused with Bloods Theory, often in violent conflict with Crip Theory)
Now halfway through series 1. Thanks for the tip. 🙂